North Korea/Sony Story Shows How Eagerly U.S. Media Still Regurgitate Government Claims

The identity of the Sony hackers is still unknown. President Obama, in a December 19 press conference, announced: “We can confirm that North Korea engaged in this attack.” He then vowed: “We will respond. . . . We cannot have a society in which some dictator some place can start imposing censorship here in the United States.”The U.S. Government’s campaign to blame North Korea actually began two days earlier, when The New York Times – asusual – corruptly granted anonymity to “senior administration officials” to disseminate their inflammatory claims with no accountability. These hidden “American officials” used the Paper of Record to announce that they “have concluded that North Korea was ‘centrally involved’ in the hacking of Sony Pictures computers.” With virtually no skepticism about the official accusation, reporters David Sanger and Nicole Perlroth deemed the incident a “cyberterrorism attack” and devoted the bulk of the article to examining the retaliatory actions the government could take against the North Koreans.

But – especially after that first NYT article, and even more so after Obama’s press conference – the overwhelming narrative disseminated by the U.S. media was clear: North Korea was responsible for the hack, because the government said it was.That kind of reflexive embrace of government claims is journalistically inexcusable in all cases, for reasons that should be self-evident. But in this case, it’s truly dangerous.https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/01/01/north-koreasony-story-shows-eager-u-s-media-still-regurgitate-government-claims/It Wasn’t North Korea Or Russia: Sony Hack “Perpetrator” Said To Be Laid-Off, Disgruntled EmployeeFirst it was, with “absolute certainly”, North Korea. Then, out of the blue, an even more ridiculous theory emerged about the origin of the Sony hackers: Russia. Now, we finally get the truth, and as it turns out it was neither of the abovementioned sovereign actors who had nothing better to do than to hack movie scripts and racist emails: it was Sony’s own disgruntled worker who was the source of the hack. According to Politico, FBI agents investigating the Sony Pictures hack were briefed Monday by a security firm that says its research points to laid-off Sony staff, not North Korea, as the perpetrator.”